Hearing that I was going to be a father was not a shock. My wife and I had been married for three years and we were "trying" – the worst euphemism in the English language.

"I'm pregnant," Jessica declared, out of the blue, in a Paris cafe. I whooped, I think, and ordered champagne. I was excited, nervous maybe. But mainly I was relieved, in a very male self-centred way. All I could think was: finally, I know I'm not shooting blanks.

Back home in London I threw myself into the role of expectant father with text-book zeal. I gave up alcohol, blue cheese and sushi to bond with my wife's new regime. I consumed shelves of child-rearing books, read daily foetal developmental updates emailed from numerous baby-related websites. After the thrill of the 12-week scan, I sang to my unborn child every night. "You sound like Boyzone being strangled," Jessica said, but I managed to remain calm, not wanting to raise her blood pressure. "Our baby needs to hear me," I explained, patiently. "Our baby needs to know how much I love it. It's all about connection."

While many of my male friends complained of feeling excluded by their partners' pregnancies – the whirlwind of Mothercare visits, National Childbirth Trust courses, baby-showers and general infant-focused insanity that accompanies mothers-to-be in the Baby's R Us economies of the developed world – I felt involved. I thought of myself like Andy Murray's coach, raising a rallying fist from the player's box and occasionally dashing down on to court to administer much needed liquids and massages to the neck and shoulders. We were a team, Jessica and me. A poster for modern, supportive coupledom.

When the 20-week scan revealed we were having a son, I emailed his picture to most of the contacts in my address book. "It's a little creepy," Jessica declared as we sipped herbal tea together. "You're a man, remember?"

Yes, that was the problem. Men like to be in control, to solve problems, whether real or merely perceived. Pregnancy is one of those times in their lives when men feel least in control. We can do nothing but faff around the edges of a life-changing event. So we devour information, make strategies, research car seats, baby monitors and the latest German-designed travel cots.

Yet my mania wasn't just about coping with a growing sense of powerlessness. I wanted my wife to feel supported, to feel that I understood what she was going through. Having come of age in the late 80s and early 90s, I was part of a generation of men raised by working mothers to be wholly involved at home, to share the load of cooking, cleaning and, above all, kids. While my grandfather sipped beer in his working men's club when my mother was born, and my father was on the fringes of the delivery room when I arrived, I would be there at the coal-face, snipping the umbilical cord with zeal.

As the due date approached, my focus on the birth became even more intense. I started to obsess about my mobile phone's battery life, plugging it into wall sockets everywhere from the sandwich bar to the gym. I rushed to finish deadlines, pay bills. I managed, sort of, to put together the birthing pool in our living room, testing its temperature at half hourly intervals, sometimes in the middle of the night.

On the due date, my wife fell asleep at lunchtime. I paced, watched television, folded towels. When she woke in the late afternoon, the contractions accelerated.

I called the midwives, boiled kettles, unfolded towels and flapped around like a big anxious bird while my wife gave birth.

Jessica was strong, focused, intense. She didn't use painkillers or air, but went into herself in a way I could not really understand, but admired deeply. I remained on the periphery, pacing around as if in a cell, torn between extreme curiosity and immense terror at this intensely physical process that was accelerating unremittingly before my eyes in the middle of my living room.

From feeling intrinsically connected to my wife, part of a two-person team about to ascend Everest, I felt suddenly and overwhelmingly alone, cast out on a rock face without a rope. And I was suddenly conscious of being inherently, clumsily, ignorantly male in a wholly female world of blood and birth – a hapless, useless bloke watching women making the world turn. Suddenly, there was a rush of activity and a tiny thing was being raised from the birthing pool water. As the head and limbs cleared the surface, the creature opened its lungs and wailed. The whirlwind continued, our midwives doing their amazing work, delivering the placenta, giving the baby its Vitamin K shot, making sure my wife was all right. I held Jessica's shoulders as she hugged our son, talking to him, feeding him, loving him.

I couldn't take my eyes off the baby. His wrinkled flesh was growing ever pinker as the blood pumped around his tiny body. I stared and stared.

And felt nothing.

"Aren't you going to hold him?" my wife asked, and I nodded because I had no idea what else to do. Rather than feeling the surge of love and affection that was clearly overwhelming my wife to the point of tears, I felt empty. And terrified. I couldn't move a muscle for fear of breaking the baby, so small and fragile was he in my hands, which suddenly seemed so clumsy and brutish.

I was in shock. I went to bed dazed and confused. I was a father. This was my baby son. But I felt no connection to him. In my darker moments, I even felt resentment towards this child – my wife was exhausted, stressed by the lack of sleep and necessity to get on a feeding schedule. It felt like I was losing her. For ever.

In the days that followed I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me. That maybe after all these years the truth had finally come out, that I was some kind of psychopath, incapable of compassion and empathy. After all, if you can't feel something for a defenceless week-old baby, who happens to be your baby, something must be wrong.

All my preparation had been a phony war. Now I was in the thick of the real conflict and I couldn't cope. But I kept it to myself – what man ever got sympathy from anyone for finding things difficult after the birth?

In public, I was cooing and attentive to the baby. I told my wife how much I loved him. But I didn't own the emotion. I was, in many ways, going through the motions, seeing myself in a movie in which I was playing the doting dad, which meant changing nappies, taking the buggy out for long walks to give Mummy a rest, making sure my wife was eating and drinking enough to keep up my son's feeds.

But in the depths of the east London night, as I paced with this small, sleepless – often screaming – homunculus, unable to figure out what he needed, and suspecting it was simply his mother, I found myself finally in tears. Not of joy, but sprung from a very deep despair. What did it mean being a father, if I didn't feel close to my little boy at all?

Then, slowly, something happened. My son stopped simply gazing at me with small dark eyes like a baby shark's – interested only in feeding ravenously and thrashing around in the water – and looked at me. I watched his pupils focus, he followed me when I moved. He saw me.

And one day he smiled. Every time I approached he smiled. A few days later, he reached up his hand and grasped my finger. And something lifted from me as I was taken over by a simple overwhelming joy that I hadn't felt since my own childhood.

The psychologists or biologists would say it takes time for the imprinting of child to father to happen. Others might argue that men find it difficult to connect to things in their lives until they can act upon them in a way that elicits an obvious reaction. Perhaps it wasn't until I could pull a face at my son and make him laugh, or tickle him and have him grab my finger, that he started to melt my heart.

My own very personal journey into the deepest love of all – that of a parent for a child – was a slow burn. But it left me deeply connected to Milo in a way that I never imagined. He was an early riser, often well before 6am, and while less than six hours' sleep a night undoubtedly left me greyer and more wrinkled than if I'd never had kids, I grew to cherish these stolen hours before going to work.

It was a strangely benign, peaceful time, disconnected from any wider reality. We sat in front of the TV watching Teletubbies and In the Night Garden, listened to a weird little album of Jerry Garcia singing American nursery rhymes that Milo's grandmother had sent from Denver, watched the milky sun rise above the tower blocks through the back window, and generally hung out on the sofa like college room-mates without a plan or care in the world.

When my daughters Esme and Isla were born, 17 months and a further two years later, I was prepared. I didn't expect love at first sight. Once again it took time for me to fall for them, as languidly and surely as the changing of an English season.

Almost six years after Milo's birth, I still insist on a hug and a kiss from my squirming, embarrassed boy when I come home from work. I still open my girls' bedroom door before going to bed and stare in at them, a moment of repose and wellbeing that feels almost religious.

Our kids are now five, four and two. I went to book a vasectomy last week. "Are you sure?" asked the GP, as a matter of course. I looked at her, and couldn't answer. "Come back next year," she smiled, knowingly. "Next!"

• Jim Keeble'sThe Happy Numbers of Julius Miles, the tale of a reluctant father, is published on May 11 by Alma Books, £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39, including free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846